Helen Pynor

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Helen Pynor’s work reflects her ongoing fascination with the porosity between mind and body, culture and biology, body and memory. Drawing on her own dual backgrounds in the biological sciences and the visual arts, Pynor’s work explores the interiority of the human body, evoking a sense of slippage between time, cultural memory, and the tissues of the body. In the cool, watery, disorientated atmosphere of Helen Pynor’s photographic work, visceral immediacy diffuses into the narratives of other times and divergent cultures, in a gesture that collapses past and present.

In her series The Life Raft, Pynor reflects on the bodies of humans and animals, and the accidents of fate that determine their futures in life and in death. The series entails a collection of nineteenth century insects and crustaceans, which slowly collapse into the paper on which they are mounted. Referencing the history of photography, the artist uses traditional toning and hand colouring of silver gelatin, fibre-based prints, thus creating bespoke images that embody the rich tones and intricacy of the specimen collection itself. Found in Sydney, the collection’s yellowing specimen labels offer clues to the lost provenance, indicating late eighteenth century Europe and Africa. The identity of collector and creatures remain a mystery, inviting speculation on distant and unknown lives.

In the ‘Milk’ series, Pynor presents medicinal plants used by the Dharawal people of the Sydney and Illawarra region of New South Wales. The plants merge with ambiguous fluids that gradually unfurl, as if in slow motion, curling around plants and dispersing through the surrounding medium. The shared fates of bodies and plants entwine, whilst cultural histories and futures (those acknowledged and unacknowledged) are divined.